I'm filing this under "steampunk" because I keep seeing it referred to as steampunk, so that's where I suspect a lot of readers will look for it.

But Daniel Abraham's 2013 novella, The Incident of the Harrowmoor Dogs, doesn't really fit the bill. Sure, it's English and set in the proper era, but the book involves a mystical portal and demon canines -- there's nothing steampunk about it, if you take "steampunk" to mean a tale set in the Victorian age with steam- and clockwork-driven technology that's historically out of place. The book leans more toward the supernatural; I've seen it described as "Sherlock Holmes meets HP Lovecraft," and that's as good a description as any I've seen.

Balfour and Meriwether are agents of the queen, adept at what they do and diverse in their talents -- Balfour likes knives, for instance, while Meriwether prefers pistols. When another agent disappears under mysterious circumstances, they are deployed to track him down. Their journey takes them to a sanitarium, an abandoned farmhouse and deep down a well with more than water in its depths.

I usually try to avoid spoilers, but I will offer this warning: the book offers some controversial (and, aptly enough I suppose, positively Victorian) views on homosexuality, but don't let yourself be too easily offended. Abraham provides something of a red herring in a pivotal scene in which one of his protagonists behaves simply abominably.

The book also exposes an unusual alliance between England and one of the book's primary villains, but it never really explains why that alliance is useful or even how such an alliance was arranged. (Demon dogs, so far as we can tell, don't talk, much less negotiate.)

That's balanced against Abraham's obvious gift for dialogue and description. His characters are appealing and scream for further development. His setting is suitably eerie, giving us an England where things much worse than Jack the Ripper stalk the night.

Overall, I very much enjoyed the tone and pacing of this book. While I still balk at labeling this book as steampunk, it wouldn't take much effort to make it so -- I have no idea if Abraham has pursued that genre more diligently in other books.